Child's Play
by stikjok
Summary: Wen Spencer's Elfhome series. Takes place 10 years after Wood Sprites. The war is still going on, and things are grimmer.


**I do not own any characters or universes. I just like to make them dance to my tune.**

The girl formerly known as Chuck Norris was not the worlds' champion at having patience. Now ten years old and standing as short and brown as the rest of her nestlings, she had an even larger need to pace than her sister Tinker, well known to her friends as someone that thought better in motion. Waiting was a kind of hell for Weps, as her brother had taken to calling her. Waiting sucked. She picked up and put down various oddments of wire and blueprints, redrew the presentation illustration on the whiteboard and properly queued it in the buffer. Still a half hour to go. Weps growled. Bad enough to do this in front of so many, but her nestlings had elected her as project manager and let her do this alone.

They had hollowed out her own corner of Pittsburgh Scrap and Salvage, now run by Roaches family on lease by Tinker and Oilcan. When Weps had begged for some lab space for her projects, Oilcan _domu _had negotiated for her with Roach for space, a new trailer, and utility hookups on the eastern side closest to Mckees bridge and escape, if needed. Three _laiden _Wind clan soldiers had been detailed as her protection, and kept as out of her way as possible. Their only problem was a tendency to rush into the trailer at every little explosion. It was enough, some days, for Weps to want to punch a wall.

Ten minutes to go. They had better _not_ be late.

* * *

Louise stepped out of the Rolls last, after Thorne Scratch on Stone, Derek Maynard, still head of EIA on Elfhome, and Jack Williamson, newly elected Police Chief of Pittsburgh. A hand of her sisters' _sekasha_ had exited the car ahead of them and were prowling the nearby buildings and trash, verifying that no _oni_ had buried or hidden themselves in the detritus. She stretched her back, groaning at the muscle pain that combat training was giving her. Pony had insisted that the family needed more than wits to protect themselves and had given the kids beginning exercises and dances designed to enhance strength, speed and balance. For the adults, he had for the past years drilled unmercifully in training, demanding that they pay attention to the physical side of their beings so they could help protect the nestlings, if needed.

A few stretches were usually enough to loosen her up, however. Pony always knew just how hard to push.

Just past the gate on the chain link fence, a small figure was leaning against the door of the lab/trailer. It said, "You're five minutes late."

Louise grinned and pointed at Chief Williamson. "Not my fault, Chuck. He had to beat down his three kids when they found out where we were going. A scrapyard? And the lead rider for Team Tinker? Any kid would saw off their left foot for the chance."

Her sister ran down the stairs and gave her a hug, then another one for Thorne Scratch. She then grabbed Lou's hand and tugged impatiently towards the door. "C'mon, sis. Lots to show. And call me Weps now."

The lab only had two mismatched and duct-taped chairs, so the group casually leaned against the cabinets on either side of the center working table. Weps brought the first page out of the buffer, a generic line drawing of an Oni warrior caste. Over seven feet tall and over muscled, with fangs set into a snarling muzzle, the brute was carrying a rocket launcher with a collection of pistols and blades around his waist.

She stood on a small platform in Team Tinker colors of blue and white and said, "I really want to thank you all for coming. I know that it takes a leap of faith to trust that I might have something worthwhile for you to see, considering my teams' age. Just bear with me for about an hour, and I hope to prove out your trust." She turned to the board. "The Oni have a lot of natural advantages over our forces, especially the human volunteer units. They are stronger, faster, and have more endurance and innate magical resistance, not to mention the leaders that have extra abilities to bolster and conceal troop movements."

She changed the board to the next page. "We determined three areas where equipment could be improved to help fight the Oni. Detection, Defence, and Doughboy. I'm using Doughboy as a term to represent untrained and untested soldiers like most of us humans. As an example, the elves use spell arrows as their long distance sniper weapon of choice. It takes decades for them to be so proficient with them that they can be trusted not to shoot each other. Humans don't have that long to learn. We need simpler, but more powerful weapons to put into our hands."

Weps pushed the board to the next page. "Let's start with detection. On their own, the Oni soldiers are easy to find with standard binocs, night vision and heat detection. The problem is when there is a Greater Blood among them to hide troops with illusion. We all know of our losses due to this from the first attack on Ginger Wine's enclave to hidden ambushes along the railway. What we've done is determine the difference between spell magic and innate magical frequencies. They both need Mana to operate, whether from ley lines, batteries or generators. After analysis, though, we found that the innate magic needed for illusions or any innate ability is at a much higher frequency, phase shifted through the neurons in the body and picking up any needed mana as it was held in stasis in the bodies natural batteries."

She picked up a two-inch disc from the table. "So this is our first generation detector. If an innate ability is being used any closer than fifty feet from from the pin, it'll start dinging only in the users ear until turned off. It has a variable range from ten to fifty feet to aid triangulation, has a long lasting magical battery, on par with a smoke detector. Our plan is to next design a handheld model that will determine direction and distance, but that will take a lot more computer simulations to nail it down. This first model isn't really scaleable, there seems to be an inverse cube law on diminishing effectability for the frequency detection. And, uh, it really can't tell the difference between _domane_ caste spells and the illusions. Usability will probably be limited to scouts, or human larp patrols.

"Next is defense. Nikolai took lead with this one. In short, our ability with quality shields is better than our enemies, if a _domane_ is with the troops. The problem, as you know, is our shortage of these prizes. Tinker already provided a portable shield generator, and we've been using it to great effect over five years. Our improvement is in deployment, relying, once again, on detection. If bullets and rockets are coming at you without warning, you have a limited time to activate it and save the first victims of the attack. What we've attached to the generator is a kinetic detection field that will automatically switch the shield generator on if anything is approaching it from the speed of subsonic ammo and above. We still need better armor for our troops, and we're thinking about the problems.

Weps sighed. "The easiest problem to tackle, is, of course weapons. The human race has refined ways of killing each other over the past millennia unrelentingly, so adapting modern Earth weapons to magic and Elfhome really isn't that hard."

"The first thing we'd like to show you is a new gun designed for power and simplicity. We've installed two powerful spells into the form of a sniper rifle." She reached under the table and pulled out a matte black rifle stock with an oversized scope and undersized muzzle, then advanced the whiteboard to the next page, revealing an exploded view drawing. "This is not a sniper rifle, or any other kind of rifle. It's a spell thrower in a high impact plastic stock. We could have put it in a pistol stock, but we thought that it would be too dangerous to our own troops that way."

"The interior of the stock has two spells micro etched into separate ceramic tiles based on the heatproof tiles that used to be used on the space shuttles. We only have the two 10 micron printers in town that can manufacture these, so I'd protect them as vital war material. There is a selector on the right side that switches between the two, a force strike, or a flame strike. It works by emitting an ultraviolet range finding laser that is visible only through the scope. When the trigger is depressed, the range finder informs the spell chips as to the exact location the strike should occur. The bullets in the magazine are really oversized ceramic magic batteries with wax connectors that burn out when the magic is explosively expelled through the chips. The magazine cycles the cartridges up on the left and down on the right and dings when no unused shells are left. The shells are recharged easily. As to power… let's hit the range."

She led the group to an empty field outside the fence fifty yards to the north. Two warg targets had been set up 100 yards away and 50 yards apart. Weps asked Thorne to ensure that the range was clear, then handed the gun to her. "This is how you turn on the range finder and scope, and this is the safety. The trigger is a standard double click just like our sniper guns. You don't have to adjust for wind speed or direction, or even gravity. There's no recoil, because you aren't really firing anything. All you are doing with this weapon is lighting up a target, and casting a spell. This lever on the side cycles the battery shells, and with practise, a new shell can be ready in about a second and a half. I've selected force strike for the first shell. Please fire on the right target."

Thorne hefted the gun experimentally and sighted through the scope at the target. She fingered the safety off and stroked the trigger to the first click. She slowly let out her breath and depressed to the second position.

The warg disappeared in a hammerfist of air and thunder, pieces of the target flying away in all directions. Everyone but Thorne, Weps and her guards ducked instinctively, wincing at the noise. When the echoes died away, she said, "It's about the same energy release as one of our 3 ton wrecking balls being released from five stories up. We selected directionality on both spells to be from straight up, to avoid backtracking by the enemy. Thorne Scratch, could you select flame strike and hit the other target?"

Thorne had been grinning madly since firing the force strike. She found the selector on the right side and clicked it forward, then sighted down the next target. It exploded in a nerve wracking gout of fire and smoke, the cloud of black ash immediately rising and forming a mini umbrella cloud climbing rapidly. The target had been set on a pad of concrete, and to Lou's shock, she saw that the concrete itself was burning merrily, with outgasses flaring from bright yellow to dull white. The group waited in silence while the fires died out. Weps turned to the rest and said, "The flame strike is roughly equivalent to twenty five pounds of thermite. The range works just like Prince True Flames' spells, line of sight. If it can be seen, it can be hit. And this tech **is** scalable; if the war committee chooses, we could build the same gun on a cannon chassis."

Weps led the group back into the trailer and offered tea all around. She took her place again on the platform. "Okay, to wrap this up, the nestlings will keep working on improvements and innovation. It's up to the war committee to decide what will be used where, or even if. If the enemy captures one of the guns, for instance, it would be _bad._ Reverse engeneering works as well for them as for us.

Weps sighed. "We're sick of this war. It's been going on as long as we've been alive. We're too small to fight, so this is the most we can do. We'll keep it up as long as we need to, but we would really like to finish growing up **not** in a war zone. And that concludes today's update. We'll keep in touch weekly with Lou as to our progress and schedule another demonstration soon. Thank you."


End file.
